Introducing UCS Central: Unified Computing at Global Scale

If your motto is “go big or go home” then you’re probably going to like UCS Central. Since inception, Cisco’s Unified Computing System has upheld some important core tenets in its design ethos: management via policy, simple scaling and open infrastructure programmability. UCS Central, a new management product in the UCS family, extends all of those principles to a level of scale and granular administrative reach that are truly unprecedented in our industry. The Data Center team at Cisco is very excited about what UCS Central is going to mean for our customers, so on November 8th we’re hosting an online event to lay out the whole story. I hope you will join us.

UCS Central is essentially a manager of managers. Consider a single domain of UCS to be a pair of Fabric Interconnects where an instance of UCS Manager resides and looks after the goings on of up to 160 servers and all of their I/O connectivity. UCS Central now allows administrators to manage multiple domains of UCS and scale their aggregate environment to the range of 10,000 servers.

You might say that UCS customers can opt for the “go big” option. I suppose since this the golden age of mobility, they can access it all remotely to go big and go home…

UCS Central was developed with direct input from our many customers who are deploying multiple domains of UCS within and across their data centers. They want to take the dynamic administrative power of UCS to the next logical level of scale. Similarly, the last three years has seen a fantastic adoption of the “programmable infrastructure” capabilities of the UCS system by leading systems management ISVs. That trend is just going bigger with UCS Central, which is based on the same data model and API structure as UCS Manager. Innovative implementations from Cloupia, Compuware, Science Logic, Splunk and Zenoss are already on the way. Cisco’s Intelligent Automation for Cloud naturally takes full advantage of UCS programmability, and today also marks a new release there.

There are a couple of key references I recommend you take a look at to understand the full capability and scope of UCS Central. One is this page where we’ve posted all the material you need to get a close up view of the product. Even better is this episode of TechWise TV devoted to UCS Central where Brian Schwarz and Roger Andersson (two of the brilliant minds behind UCS) give a great overview and demo.

In a nutshell: UCS Central enables global management of many Cisco UCS domains, making staff more efficient and effective. It gives administrators a high-level view and management of all their UCS domains and the ability to logically group domains for ease of control.

● Centralized Inventory of all Cisco UCS components for a definitive view of the entire infrastructure and simplified integration with current Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes

● Centralized, policy-based firmware upgrades that can be applied globally or selectively through automated schedules or as business workloads demand

● Global ID pooling to eliminate identifier conflicts

● Global administrative policies that enable both global and local management of the Cisco UCS domains

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